Affiliate Marketing: What It Is and Why You Should do it Increasing your website’s traffic through SEO techniques takes time and patience, and when it is your business on the line, it’s natural to want to speed up the process. One extremely beneficial option for doing this is by using affiliate marketing, especially through an experienced company. Simply put, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy in which you would pay a company (or publisher) to help promote your service, product, or website. Usually this consists of paying your publisher through commission when someone follows a link from their website to yours, traced by a code or through cookies, that enables you to see where the visitor is coming from. It is often a low risk way of obtaining new customers quickly and easily. The results of affiliate marketing can be both significant and long lasting. This allows you to delegate some of the burden of finding new site visitors so that you can focus on other things- even if it’s just expanding the same focus even further.
How It Works and How to Do it If you can get an extra helping hand promoting your brand—and paying for exactly what you’re getting and not anything more— why wouldn’t you? More people posting your links and increasing your link building means that more people are seeing it in different places. When choosing a publisher, you want to make sure their site will provide the maximum potential for your advertising. There are several things to consider while evaluating this potential. Looking at their website’s traffic is always a good idea—high traffic means that more users are laying eyes on your link. You are also going to want to
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make sure that your publisher has a site relevant to your product, and a site of good quality that would potentially have readers interested in making a purchase. As always, ensure that your content will be placed on a site that will help promote your brand instead of hurting it; the publisher’s reputation has the potential to alter yours, whether it is for better or for worse. It’s also crucial to consider whether or not your publisher can write good sales copy: if they aren’t a convincing salesperson in their blog, then both of you may end up wasting time and energy. Some bloggers’ writing style doesn’t mesh well with sales, and it never hurts to do a little research to check and see if this would be the case. There are three main types of affiliate marketing: pay per click marketing, pay per sale advertising, and pay per lead. In pay per click marketing, the affiliate is paid every time a potential customer leaves their website by clicking on the link to your site. Pay per sale advertising pays the publisher when an actual sale is made due to the advertising on the publisher’s website. Pay per lead follows a similar approach; publishers get paid whenever a potential customer registers at your website due to the advertising of the publisher. The concept, however, remains consistent: you are paying for direct results and nothing extra.
In-‐House versus Using an Affiliate Network When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are two platforms you have to choose from. You essentially have the option of either running the program on an affiliate network, or running the program on in-house based software. The majority of merchants tend to prefer using an affiliate agency instead of using or developing in-house software. One of the biggest benefits of using an in-house program is saving money on network
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fees you would be paying an affiliate network. While you pay for an affiliate program (often paying for either some sort of monthly fee or a percentage of what you pay your publishers), there are benefits that far outweigh the costs. You won’t have to worry about any of the technical details like tracking, reporting, or manually paying your publishers since the program performs all of these basic functions for you. An affiliate network also has the advantage of recruiting affiliates from a broader span of already-existing publishers that are reliable, credible, and potentially extremely profitable. Especially for new affiliate marketers, using an affiliate network can be helpful while learning the ropes, though it is a decision based on individual need. Regardless of whether you are new or advanced, however, using an affiliate network can offer a simplified process and an immediate wide range of publishers you likely wouldn’t have had otherwise for only a small and worthwhile fee. Affiliate marketing can simplify your advertising campaign, and using an affiliate network can simplify your marketing.
Why You Should Do It Advertisers, also called merchants in this case, often like affiliate marketing as a marketing strategy because they only need to pay when there are actual results. You aren’t going to be paying for a service that goes unused—in most cases, you will only pay for the affiliate’s work purely on a commission basis. This can provide a mutually beneficial relationship between you and those helping you promote your brand. You get the opportunity for potential visitors coming to your site (and only having to pay for the ones who do), and the publisher gets paid while suggesting your service, product, or site, increasing revenue and credibility for the both of you. And you don’t just have to stop with one affiliate—the more affiliates posting
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your content, the more potential customers coming to your site. Your revenue has the potential to increase exponentially; one affiliate can often lead to more, allowing your content to be spread far and wide. Treat your affiliates as a virtual sales staff; when rewarded with commission and respect, they’ll be motivated to continuously strive for better results. Their promotions can also be seen round the clock, twenty-four hours a day, increasing the likelihood of someone stumbling upon it. When people see your product not only on a trusted blog or website, but on several, they will be more likely to purchase it themselves or share it with others. Even if they don’t purchase anything on the first visit, they may share the information with someone who will, or they might come back at a later time after further research. Tracking the effectiveness of new advertising campaigns also becomes even easier when using affiliate marketing, sending out new copy to myriad websites that will repost them quickly. With tracking software in place, it is easy to monitor which ads get people coming to your site and which ones fail to generate interest or hype about your product. This kind of unbiased feedback that is easy to translate into better results is extremely valuable and offers the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Just as you can monitor which ads are effective and adapt quickly to increase effectiveness, you can also monitor new trends in your own industry and react quickly. By paying attention to what’s going on in the world around you, you will be able to make product sales around it by being able to understand what people are looking for and when.
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Affiliate marketing is also a great method for link building. Successful link building is a big factor in search engine optimization (SEO) formulas, which are essential to being highly ranked by search engines. The higher you’re ranked on search engines, the higher priority and visibility your site is given. With the majority of web traffic being directed by popular search engines, being given a high search engine ranking can be crucial for the success of your site. Link building is essentially the practice of someone posting links to your website on theirs (as they would do with affiliate marketing). The more sites you have doing this means that your ranking will be higher in search engines, resulting in further traffic and business possibilities. The affiliates will also be able to personally select the ads they will place on their websites based on what they know their audience will be receptive to. The publishers know the demographics of their site’s visitors, and they’ll be able to best select what will attract them to an ad and be more likely to successfully send business your way. Each publisher can choose an individual ad or copy that will be best responded to on their specific site with their specific audience. Getting your name, brand, and product out into the world—especially in the potentially endless abyss of the Internet—takes time and luck. Affiliate marketing can drastically reduce, though not eliminate, both of these. It is low risk, quick working, and easily affordable while offering potentially long term and significant results. If you are able to find great merchants with large audiences—a process simplified by using an experienced affiliate network program—potential customers will not only be seeing your product, but they will have someone whose opinion they value and trust telling them firsthand that it is worth investing in.
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Additional Information and Resources Thank you for downloading the What is Affiliate Marketing Guide. It was designed to help understand affiliate marketing and help your store get to the next level and ultimately grow your business. If you have not started an affiliate program, try our affiliate software for free. Not only does affiliate marketing increase your sales by 30%, it also helps your business build links because you will attract affiliates who will point back to your website when they market your store for you. Additionally, if you want to learn more online marketing strategies, check out the Affiliate Marketing Blog that covers online marketing from the basics to the best advanced strategies. Lastly, visit the The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Guide to learn how to help boost your business.
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